Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 31 July.
Top stories
Facebook has declared it is not “our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false” in a final, positive self-assessment of its actions in response to the death tax misinformation circulating on the platform during the May federal election. In correspondence seen by Guardian Australia, Simon Milner, Facebook’s vice-president in the Asia-Pacific, tells Labor’s outgoing national secretary, Noah Carroll: “I understand that your preference would be for Facebook to remove all content that you believe constitutes misinformation – which in this instance mean all content that discussed whether or not Labor intends to introduce a death tax – rather than demote it; however Facebook only removes content that violates our community standards.”
A former stonemason is pleading with authorities to reduce the national mandatory limit for silica dust exposure: the Victorian father has a life expectancy of five to 10 years if he doesn’t get a lung transplant soon. Safe Work Australia, the national body that develops work health and safety policies, will decide on Wednesday whether to reduce the dust exposure limit. Michael Nolan, 33, was diagnosed in Marchwith silicosis. “I can’t even laugh properly any more – if I laugh too hard for too long, I can’t breathe, it feels like I’m going to pop one of my lungs,” he told Guardian Australia.
The Department of Home Affairs does not keep track of how many people claim asylum at Australian airports, freedom of information documents have revealed. The revelation has prompted concern that there is no way of knowing if Border Force officers are ensuring all asylum seekers are being appropriately assessed. Using the Right to Know system for seeking government documents, an applicant asked the department for records of claims for protection made at Australian airports before or during immigration clearance since 2008. The request was refused because the requested documents did not exist. “[The] total number of persons raising protection claims at Australia’s borders remains undetermined,” the FoI response said.
World
A former senior government analyst has accused the Trump administration of “undercutting evidence” of the threat to national security from the climate crisis after his report on the issue was blocked by the White House.
Cambridge Analytica did work for Leave.EU on the EU referendum, emails confirm, even though the company never received payment for it.
Boris Johnson has clashed with his Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, over the Irish backstop, in their first phone call since the Johnson entered Downing Street.
The estranged wife of the ruler of Dubai has asked an English court for a forced marriage protection order relating to their children and a non-molestation order.
Doctors have turned the brain signals for speech into written sentences in a research project that aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities communicate.
Opinion and analysis
Giving up alcohol for Dry July or some random month is nothing special but for Gay Alcorn, who hadn’t had 30 days without drinking her entire adult life, it was a big thing. “Drinking was what I ‘did’ – preferably alone in my head or watching some Netflix show or offering random opinions on Twitter. Feeling slow or a little sad in the mornings was so normal I barely noticed it.” There was a sense of achievement in doing something she wasn’t quite sure she could do, but she hadn’t expected the scale of its impact.
Clean energy will be providing 35% of Australia’s total electricity needs within two years, analysts say, as new data underlines the pace at which solar power is transforming the national grid. A report by the consultant Green Energy Markets found rooftop solar systems and new large-scale farms regularly pushed renewable energy to beyond 30% of generation at midday during June, one of the least sunny months. Tristan Edis, a Green Energy Markets director and analyst, said clean energy growth would continue in the short term due to the number of projects that had been financially committed but were yet to come online. But he said despite falling prices the boom was expected to end in the absence of a national policy to encourage future clean investments.
Sport
A new documentary, Collingwood: From The Inside Out, focuses on the Magpies’ journey to the 2018 AFL grand final. But the team’s on-field performance becomes a side note in the film, which aims to portray a more universal human story – that of the mental health struggles of the modern-day footballer.
Caster Semenya will be prevented from defending her 800m title at the world athletics championships in Doha next month. The Swiss supreme court has reversed a ruling that suspended a regulation imposed by the sport’s governing body, the IAAF, regarding testosterone levels pending her appeal.
The latest episode of The Spin is all about the Ashes, pronouncing Labuschagne and nuns at the cricket. Host Emma John is joined by Vic Marks and Geoff Lemon to preview the men’s Ashes series. Plus they discuss Ireland’s historic first Test at Lord’s, Australia’s dominance in the women’s Ashes and pick their fancy dress outfits for the Eric Hollies Stand.
Thinking time: Too Much Lip
Melissa Lucashenko has the flu but that doesn’t stop her breathing fire down the phone line. “This bloody bullshit about the forgotten white working class – if there’s any forgotten people in Australia, if there’s any battlers in Australia, it’s brown and black people,” she says. Lucashenko has just found out she’s won the 2019 Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most prestigious prize for fiction, for her novel Too Much Lip. It’s a book the writer says was “risky” from the beginning.
“I wanted to portray the Australian underclass in rural NSW, and especially the black underclass,” Lucashenko says. “I wanted to talk about class. I wanted to write about the connections between poor blacks and poor whites in the country, and in the jail class.” A founding member of Sisters Inside, the Queensland-based not-for-profit that advocates for the rights of female prisoners, Lucashenko cares passionately about the intersection of the underclasses and the jail system. “Prison is fundamental to keeping poor people poor,” she says. “The poorest of the poor. Australia hasn’t changed in this respect over two centuries. This mentality of chucking people away when they’re inconvenient started in Britain and has continued until today. Except these days it’s extremely big business.”
Media roundup
Two Liberal staffers have told the Sydney Morning Herald they were sexually assaulted while working for senior politicians. The SMH also reports that Icac will investigate key Labour figures over Chinese donations. The Australian reveals that laws to protect the private metadata of millions of Australians are being subverted by a vast array of organisations using loopholes to “access information only meant to be used by security agencies and police.”
Coming up
Andy Penn, the head of Telstra, will address the National Press Club on how to get Australia’s communications systems right.
A rally will be held at the NSW parliament in support of abortion decriminalisation.
Sign up
If you would like to receive the Guardian Australia morning mail to your email inbox every weekday, sign up here.
